It would seem that among his kind he is alone in having chosen this particular route. Which is as he would expect. Only the mad try to cross deserts during a drought. If he makes it to the other side and locates a family of Lost Ones he is not even certain what he wants of them. Naturally he’ll ask about the white bone, but will they be able to tell him more than Torrent already has? At the least, they’ll know where not to look. And perhaps they’ll advise him about how to find the She-S’s. An entire race of master trackers should have a few tricks he’s never heard of. It is possible, in fact likely, that they will elude him. It is possible that they have found the white bone and gone to The Safe Place and are being stared at by the entranced humans. In either event he will have their forest to feed on while he plans what to do next.
The thought of the browse starts him walking. Not northeast, which is too great a diversion from his original destination,and not northwest, he won’t go that way again. He heads due north. By attending to where the sun hits his skin, he holds a steady course. Eventually he is aware of his shadow leaking out from his feet to his right. Of the world growing. He dreams and hallucinates, and the fierce patch of heat creeps across his back. When the air cools and a breeze comes up he thinks he imagines these comforts. When the landscape begins to change he ignores it for miles. He see the rocks, the clumps of bush, he hears within the bush the rustling of tiny creatures. What memory is this? He has to stroke the rough brown trunk of an acacia before he accepts that he is in the present. Awed and suspicious, he peels free a piece of the bark and puts it into his mouth and then spits it out because his mouth is too dry to swallow.
He is in a grove of acacias. Ghostly, most of them, their bark torn away. None is particularly large … the white bone won’t be found here. But water will be. He smells it. That silver glare through the trees is a pond bed then, and that darkness beyond the bed is not the horizon. It is a forested hill so high he cannot see the summit.
He hurries to the bed and in the depressed centre he digs. Not too far down there is water, and as the seepage gurgles up he sobs and gives thanks to the doomed ostrich, because if not for the ostrich kicking the lioness and if not for his breaking the ostrich’s leg, he would have kept going northwest.
Within the acacia grove is a line of termite mounds. They are no longer visible from where he is but he saw them as he came here: four mounds ascending in size from the southernmost to the northernmost. “Hasten to the hill” is their arcane message, and although he wants to feed on the acacia bark andalthough the message irritates him with its self-important urgency, he hastens–after he has drunk himself into a mildly nauseated state and then drenched and dusted his hide–to the hill.
Why? He can’t say. Obscurely he feels that to heed a message he no longer respects is to submit to the same capricious luck that doomed the ostrich and is therefore penance for his clumsy intervention. As he walks, the water sloshes in his belly. He swipes his trunk along the trees but resists stopping to feed.
The woods thicken, the wind becomes erratic. There is dead calm and then a brief blast, and on one of these blasts the odour of she-one calves reaches him. He halts and swivels his trunk, opens his ears. The smell is gone. Heart galloping, he keeps going. Another gust carries the heavier odour of an adult cow, and this time the smell stays long enough for him to locate it, and he starts to run, skirting huge multi-spurred termite mounds and red boulders, dried vegetation crackling under his feet.
They are about a third of the way up the hill. A small bull calf, a smaller cow calf and a newborn. And a cow, lying headfirst on her side, and behind her the path she made as she fell–toppled trees and long swaths of pinkish dirt smoothed to a sheen, like exposed muscle. The youngsters look at him with the glittering green eyes of visionaries.
“Hello,” Tall Time rumbles. Despite the obvious tragedy, he is exhilarated to be addressing Lost Ones. “I am Tall Time the Link Bull of the She-B’s-And-B’s.”
The three are silent.
“I am a friend of Torrent’s, Torrent the Trunk Bull. You may have heard of him.”
“We know who you are,” the bull calf says, the gruff timbre of his voice adding a good three years to the eight that Tall Time had guessed as his age.
“You envisioned me, I dare say.”
Silence.
“Are you We-F’s?”
“Lower your voice,” the bull calf says.
The impudence startles Tall Time. And then, alarmed, he opens his ears and rumbles in an undertone, “Are hindleggers nearby?”
“No longer.”
“Is the cow your mother?”
“Yes.” The bull calf looks at her. “I cannot get her to stand.”
By the improbable twist of the cow’s neck Tall Time suspects that she is dead, and yet, curiously, there is no death fetor. “I’ll come help you,” he says. He scans the hill. It is treacherously steep.
The bull calf points to Tall Time’s left. “Go over there.”
Tall Time moves along the gully at the foot of the hill to the cleft of a departed waterfall whose bed provides a series of steps he is able to climb without too much trouble. When he is level with the calves he walks gingerly toward them along a narrow lip. The lip broadens until it is the ledge where the falling cow came to a stop.
Her green eyes are riveted and unlit. Here, Tall Time can smell the fetor, but it is remarkably faint. He looks at the bull calf, and the calf stares at him a moment and then drops his head and says with quiet ferocity, “I thought she might only be stunned.”
The newborn whimpers. She has been trying to suckle from the corpse and now she whips her trunk in frustration. She whips the legs of the cow calf, who appears to be in the thrall of a petrifying memory–her eyelids flutter, temporin exudes from her temples–and yet there is no point arousing her to the horror of the present, so Tall Time studies the mother. A moment later the cow calf says, “I hear his mind!” and ogles him, open-eared, as if his thoughts were revolting, whereas all he was asking himself was how the accident could have happened.
“You have become the mind talker,” the bull calf growls.
The cow calf turns her stricken face to him.
Tall Time understands now. The cow calf has assumed the cow’s gift of mind talking and it is this–the irrevocable proof that her mother is dead–that has distressed her. How small the mother is! But judging by the fabulous length of the tusks, and taking into account that Lost One tusks are said to be deceptively long, he puts her age at thirty years. “How did she fall?” he asks the bull calf.
No answer. He’s weeping, Tall Time thinks, and he weeps as well. He touches one of the cow’s tusks.
“She tripped,” the cow calf says.
“Tripped?” Lost Ones are supposed to be as sure-footed as mountain antelopes.
“She stepped in a grunt hole. We were running. We smelled the hindleggers’ little smoke.”
Tall Time scents the air.
“Not here,” the bull calf says scornfully.
“Up on the ridge,” the female says.
Her ears are spread, her radiant heartbroken eyes skewer through Tall Time’s skull. It will take her some time yet to learn the art of mind listening while seeming not to. “What are your names?” he asks her.
“Our mother is I-Fret"–(so they are We-F’s!)–"and I am Rain, and he is Sink Hole.”
“And the newborn?”
“Grief.”
“Grief,” he says. The little calf looks up expectantly. He touches her ear … smooth and cool as a new leaf. To Rain he says, “Where is the rest of your family?”
“Back at the cave.”
“Why did your mother bring you here?”
“She was afraid of the dark.”
“She was not afraid,” Sink Hole says angrily. He swats the flies that nuzzle the corners of his mother’s eyes. “She couldn’t breathe in that cave. If she had stayed there another day she would have become deranged.”
“Is your family hiding?
”
“From the hindleggers,” Rain says in a haunted voice. She starts weeping again and drops to her knees, and Grief drops down with her, precariously close to the brink of the ledge, Tall Time scarcely has time to register the danger when Sink Hole curves his trunk around the newborn’s belly, plucks her off her feet, turns her in the air and places her between himself and the corpse.
It is a fluid manoeuvre, quicker than thought and requiring enormous strength. “Upon my soul!” Tall Time says. He blows out several astonished snorts. “Upon my soul!”
Sink Hole looks at him. “Leave us now.”
Tall Time is taken aback. “No, no, I won’t leave you on your own. I shall accompany you, make certain you arrive safely. I assume you plan on returning to the cave.”
“We haven’t mourned yet,” Sink Hole says.
“Oh, you want me to leave you while you mourn. Very well.” He tries turning. The ledge is too narrow. He starts backing away.
“We’ll meet you on top,” Sink Hole says.
Tall Time looks up.
“He thinks he might fall,” Rain tells her brother.
“Go back to the cleft,” Sink Hole says. “When it starts to steepen you’ll come to another ledge. Go west along that. The hill levels out.” He sounds not surly now but profoundly tired.
The hill does level out, moderately. The climb is still perilous (how will Grief manage it?), and only by grasping tree trunks and root cords is Tall Time able to gain the summit, a flat expanse of sparse grasses and scattered terminalia trees. Tall Time’s stomach heaves from hunger, but rather than starting to eat he peers back down the hill. He feels uncomfortable that he hasn’t properly paid his respects to the corpse. He clears his throat and in a soft rumble sings:
Ascend! Ascend! unto the home
Wherein the happy cows
Whose Island days are over roam
In sweet and luscious browse.
He pauses. There are two hundred and seventy-three verses to the hymn and he is thinking that he should skip the majority when he hears a loud keening. It sounds like a high wind, coming from … where? Everywhere, and yet the air is still. He looks at the calves. Their trunks are aloft, their mouths open. It can’t be them. It is! It is them, he hears a melody now, desolate and meandering. But beautiful, he realizes after a fewmoments. And strangely insinuating, as if in the absence of words the long slides and surges of the melody itself speak a language.
By the time the calves join him on the summit it is dark and frosty and he is lying on a bed of mulch. Not since early in the drought has he eaten this well, and for the first hour or so that he lay here his gut whined and groaned an oddly rhythmic accompaniment to the mourning dirge. And then he dozed … lightly, he thought, and yet he failed to perceive the calves’ approach. Suddenly they are beside him, their green eyes paired holes in the blackness.
He comes to his feet. “Are you hungry?” he asks.
“No,” Sink Hole says. “Let’s go.” He turns, and his sisters quickly fall in behind him, Rain grasping his tail, Grief grasping hers.
Their pace is vigorous. Tall Time keeps expecting Grief to protest or to release Rain’s tail, but she doesn’t. She is like a warthog, they all are, small and sturdy, miraculously nimble. Even going down steep inclines into utter blackness their footing is sure, their vision keen. All visionaries have sharp eyes but these three could be cats. At one point Sink Hole halts and says, “I don’t like the look of those,” and Tall Time scents and squints ahead of himself and says, “What?”
“Those two humps,” Rain says. “There.”
All Tall Time can see are shades of murkiness so imperceptible he may be imagining them. “Why?” he asks as Sink Hole detours into thick sage bush.
“Two single-peaked humps close together are unlucky,” Rain says. “Don’t you know that?”
“I dare say I don’t.” It occurs to Tall Time that the Lost Ones must have a host of signs and superstitions known only to themselves and that this is what Torrent meant when he said the links may be infinite. If not infinite, Tall Time thinks now, so abundant as to be finally ambiguous. In his doctrine of links, two single-peaked termite mounds indicate ancient she-one bones in the vicinity.
“Yes, there are,” Rain says. “Buried right under us.”
She is not only listening to his mind, she is presuming to respond to whatever she hears there. Unlike mind talkers from his part of The Domain, she doesn’t have to be facing him to penetrate his skull, and he finds himself trying to suppress the thoughts he’d prefer she not know. He answers her questions out loud so that Sink Hole won’t feel excluded, but except for a few derisive grunts, Sink Hole is silent. One of these grunts comes when Rain says she had her first vision of Tall Time earlier in the day–"Yanking a big fly’s leg"–and then, divining that he had broken the leg, says, “Sink Hole, he killed the big fly.”
She tells him that they knew who he was because he has been seen in the visions of their matriarch, I-Flounder.
“Visions?” he thinks. “More than one?”
“Five.”
“What was I doing?”
“Nobody tells Matriarch’s visions.” She sounds appalled.
“I beg your pardon.”
“Only she can tell her visions.”
“Tell me about the cave, then.”
She says that the family has been hiding for a hundred and forty-seven days, and during that time has had no contact or communication with any other Lost Ones, although at one point or another everybody has envisioned some distant family member. (Bulls, cows, calves, all Lost Ones are rampant visionaries.) Like the We-F’s, most other families have taken to dwelling in caves. In their cave the We-F’s hide from before sunrise until after sunset, when they go out to forage but not until I-Flirt, the finest scenter, has given the all-clear. Inside they talk softly. Inside and out, they sing, throwing their voices so that humans can’t identify the source, and in any event confident that when they sing they sound like birds. (“You sound like wind!” Tall Time says. “No, we don’t,” Rain says, and he entertains the possibility of there being winds and birds here with which he is unfamiliar.) Close to the mouth of the cave is a salt lick, and a rivulet of water falls down the rear wall. Three cows and one calf remain. The family was eight before I-Fret and the three of them left, which they did despite the misgivings of the matriarch, I-Flounder, who had envisioned I-Fret’s death.
“And yet your mother still left,” Tall Time says.
“She thought it was a sham vision.”
“Is there such a thing?”
“Of course. Everybody has them. Don’t you?”
“I don’t have visions at all. Very few of my kind are visionaries. Bulls never are.”
“Oh.” She appears to find this information distasteful. After a moment she says, “That saves you from having sham visions. The only time you can be certain you’re not having asham vision is if you have one of the that-way bone, but nobody ever has a vision of the that-way bone.”
Sink Hole comes to such a sudden halt that Rain bumps into him and Grief bumps into her and falls.
“But he already knows of it,” Rain says, divining the reason for the stop. She turns and helps Grief to her feet.
Sink Hole turns, and his eyes, which flash a deeper green than they did earlier, ascend to Tall Time. “It is not for us to speak of,” he says sternly and starts walking.
“Quite right,” Tall Time says. He will speak of it with the matriarch.
They have been walking for several hours now and are deep into the hills. The underscents here are intoxicating; they lull Tall Time into a state of calm wariness that he has little experience of. Wary he always is. Calm, hardly ever. The atmosphere rings with queer forces, and its own silence. He smells plenty of creatures: monkey, antelope, giraffe, warthog … and lion somewhere overhead, those exotic tree-climbing lions from the old songs. And yet there are no cries, no grunts. There is stealthy movement, that’s all, the dead foliage
snapping. He thinks of Torrent saying that the type of prodigal slaughter practised by humans is a new horror here and he guesses this accounts for the quiet creeping around.
Near midnight they enter an arid riverbed in a crevice between massive boulders. Wind sweeps down from the cliffs, and on an especially strong blast Tall Time hears snatches of the same melody that the calves were keening at the corpse of their mother.
“They know,” Sink Hole says.
“Who?” Tall Time says.
“The big cows,” Rain says. “They know our mother is dead.”
As before, Tall Time is unable to locate the source of the song–the sound both rebounds off the rock and tolls within it. “Are we almost at the cave?” he asks.
“It’s up there,” Rain says. She gestures ahead and to the right. “On the other side of High Hill.”
“That peak?”
“On the other side. We have to climb over.”
It seems impossible.
“You’re afraid,” she says.
“I’m concerned.”
“Nobody is forcing you to follow us,” Sink Hole says.
From a plateau at the mouth of the cave the We-F cows and calves watch them descend. The eyes of the three cows are so brilliant that they produce funnels of light, casting upon the precipitous slope a swampy luminescence without which Tall Time has no idea how he would have picked his way down. He had made his way up by clinging to roots and trees, but he had slipped and scraped his shin where the ostrich had pecked it.
Rain, Sink Hole and Grief trot down. “The earth tilts to meet their footfalls” is Tall Time’s wistful thought. Suddenly his little guides are lost to him. No, he is lost to them, it’s as if he’s not there. The family surrounds the three in what is clearly a reunion ceremony, hushed and exacting, unlike anything Tall Time knows. From what he can see, the calves take turns inserting their trunks into each of the cows’ mouthsand then into the mouth of the one other calf. Meanwhile the cows sway their hips in unison, a honeyed musk seeping from their hides. Two of them have stunningly long, straight tusks. The third has only one tusk, and it is the length of one of his, although much thinner.
The White Bone Page 18